Day 18 - February 10th 2009 Rome, Italy

Had an excellent Italian classe questa mattina e posso parlare migliore italiano tutti i giorni. (Speak better italian everyday!) Had lunch at one of our spots near Via XX Settembre juicing a few caffè macchiato for caffeinated attentiveness. If you have been reading my blog from the beginning I mentioned a little earlier the reasons I was taking an Art History class. Well today was one of those good-reason-I’m-taking-art-history-in-Roma-days. We entered the Musei Capitolini to study the ancient works of master sculptors, painters, and architects. One of the niftiest things is the giant bronze statue of Marco Aurelio sul cavallo (on horse), the only existing statue of a leader on horseback from the Roman empire. Although the statue that sits on the piazza between the two sections of the musei is not the original one, it is a copy replaced in 1981 when the original (which is 2000 years old) was deemed to need a stable environment away from pollution. After the musei I jumped on a bus to the Termini stazione to pick up my train tickets to travel to Cortina this Thursday with Katie to visit Sarah and Martin Wilde up in the dolomiti mountains. Made a delicious chicken cordon bleu for dinner, a little french invention in a land of pizza. I accompanied a few girls from the apartment building to the colesseo where we looked for and found the toted “Ice Club” which is a bar inside an industrial freezer with the walls, seats and bar made totally out of blocks of ice. Even the drink glass is a conical creation of ice which I most definitely ate after drinking the contents.